Newsweek is doing a cover story on Princess Diana – and what she would be like now, at 50 years old. Do you think it’s offensive to try and photoshop what Diana would look like today – or just plain weird?
The article is written by Tina Brown, who knew Princess Diana extremely well. Here are some excerpts from the interview, which you can read in full here:
On Diana’s Style: Diana would have been 50 this month. What would she have been like? Still great-looking: that’s a given. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, with her cornflower-blue eyes and striding sexuality, was a handsome woman to the very end. Fashionwise, Diana would have gone the J.Crew and Galliano route à la Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.
Would Diana have remarried?: At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Al-Fayed’s hopeless unreliability. After the breakup I see her moving to her favorite city, New York, spending a few cocooned years safely married to a super-rich hedge-fund guy who could provide her with what she called “all the toys”: the plane, the private island, the security detail. Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She’d have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host, or a globe-trotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general, rumored to have links to the ISI, would have been a particular headache to the Foreign Office and the State Department.) Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative would have become her new post-palace power circles. She would perhaps have caused a press sensation with an unplanned pledge from the CGI stage to raise $50 million to help educate women in South Sudan.
On how her relationship with Prince Charles & Camilla would be today: I believe her best male friend in later years would have been, poignantly, her reviled first husband. As the financier Sir James Goldsmith once put it, “When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy,” and Charles, having married Camilla, would suddenly have found the company of his ex strangely comforting. Diana, with time, would no longer have found Charles’s causes tiresome. Rather, she would have empathized, and asked his advice about hers. After so many loves and losses, she would finally have let go of her rancor toward Camilla. The duchess’s galleon-size Lady Bracknell hat at William’s wedding would have offered satisfaction enough.
What would she have thought of daughter-in-law Kate Middleton?: And Kate, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge? How would Diana have handled her son’s steadfast affection for a woman other than herself? The rising public adoration of Kate would have afforded Diana some tricky moments. Pleased, yes. But, like Frances Shand Kydd—who, days before Diana’s wedding, suddenly burst out, “I have good long legs, like my daughter”—Diana would have had to adjust to a broadening of the limelight. Her edge over Kate, of course, was her own epic of princessly suffering, which would always make Diana’s story more interesting. (“Happily ever after” will never have the same allure to the press as “It all went horribly wrong.”) Diana, rejoicing in her flawless Spencer pedigree, would have positioned herself as a firm defender of the Middletons against the palace snobs and ostentatiously made Carole Middleton, Kate’s dynamic mother, her new BFF.
On what she would be doing charity-wise: In the world disasters of the last few years—9/11, the tsunamis, the Pakistan earthquake, Hurricane Katrina—you know Diana would have been first at the scene in a hard hat with a camera crew (and, by now, 10 million followers on Twitter). She would have kept her spotlight trained on individual sufferers whom she’d continued to visit and care for and touch. At a time when the world has disaster fatigue, I miss the generosity of her star power and what it could accomplish.
Interesting enough article, but I don’t really see the point…
Posted Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 at 12:12pm
Filed under
Kate Middleton,
Prince William |
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